Movies: Timothy Quay

Dark fairytale about a demonic doctor who abducts a beautiful opera singer with designs on transforming her into a mechanical nightingale....

In 2015, Christopher Nolan curated a selection of short films by the surrealist animators the Quay Brothers to be distributed as a touring 35mm presentation. The three films—"In Absentia" (2000), "The Comb" (1991) and "Street of Crocodiles" (1986)—we...

A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself....

Jakob arrives at the Institute Benjamenta (run by brother and sister Johannes and Lisa Benjamenta) to learn to become a servant. With seven other men, he studies under Lisa: absurd lessons of movement, drawing circles, and servility. He asks for a be...

In Prague, a professorial puppet, with metal pincers for hands and an open book for a hat, takes a boy as a pupil. First, the professor empties fluff and toys from the child's head, leaving him without the top of his head for most of the film. The pr...

The story of Alice in Wonderland, explored in the stop-motion world of the Quay brothers....

A magnet moves on a floor. A moth beats against a window. A doll child watches the magnet; threads of metal filings gather around the magnet....

Stop-motion animated short film in which, among other things, a man made of wire looks malevolent....

Igor: The Paris Years, one segment of a larger biographical program created for Channel 4 on the life and times of Igor Stravinsky, finds the brothers working in a slightly different vein than the one that would come to characterize their later work....

Stop-motion animated short film in which a puppet on a trike captures a puppet bird-man....

The exploration of the effects of an unexpected catastrophe, known as VUE (violent unknown event) through the bios of 92 survivors....

With harpsichord music in the background, a dandy, seated at a table, plucks a quill pen from a ceiling full of them above him, dips it in ink, thinks, then draws a straight line down the page in front of him, out of which sprout six more quill pens,...

A documentary on the subject of the collections of books, instruments and medical anomalies at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Mutter Museum housed there. This short film represents the first to be made by the internationally recogn...

A man journeys by rail to a nameless sanatorium where his father has recently died. Once there, time loses its linearity and he finds himself in a world that appears both strange and strangely familiar....

A porcelain doll’s explorations of a dreamer’s imagination....

Guy Maddin, who has been nicknamed the Canadian David Lynch, is undoubtedly one of the last remaining Magi of cinema. Despite living in the middle of the digital age, this heretical director hailing from the snowy plains of Canada has spent 25 years ...

The Quays' interest in esoteric illusions finds its perfect realization in this fascinating animated lecture on the art of anamorphosis. This artistic technique, often used in the 16th- and 17th centuries, utilizes a method of visual distortion with ...

A woman sits alone on a chair at a table in a room on one of the top floors of an asylum. Bright spot lights dot the night, sometimes shining on her window. She sharpens pencils and writes on a page in a copy book. The pencil point often breaks under...

Near an extraordinary chair with many legs, a hand is visible gripping an edge. The hand is weathered, the fingers cracked and scarred. The end of a rifle appears and a shot fires. The bullet is visible whirling through space; it caroms and then goes...

Enigmatic, stop-motion, animated story of a man's day....